Realistic ceramic artist visits his exhibition in Blowing Rock, hosts tea ceremony - published March 25, 2026

Installation View, Eric Serritella: Abscission (December 13, 2025 - June 21, 2026), Blowing Rock Art & History Museum. Photo: Josh White

Story Written by: Lorelei Roberts

BLOWING ROCK — Eric Serritella spent two decades as a Vice President at an advertising agency before taking his first pottery class at 35 and falling in love with it. Twenty years later, he was in Blowing Rock hosting a traditional Gong Fu tea ceremony and displaying large-scale ceramic sculptures carved to look like birch trees and weathered logs.

Serritella is a realistic ceramic sculptor of large-scale works carved to look like birch trees and weathered logs. He has integrated glass into his ceramics, and some tree sculptures are functional teapots.

“Someone said they wished they could be as artistic as I was, but just take a pottery class and 20 years later, this could happen,” Serritella said.

Installation View, Eric Serritella: Abscission (December 13, 2025 - June 21, 2026), Blowing Rock Art & History Museum. Photo: Josh White

Serritella did his artist residency in Taiwan, where he studied the Yi Xing teapot. He learned to carve these tiny teapots from pumpkins and gourds to integrate nature into the tea ceremony.

A Gong Fu tea ceremony is a tea-brewing method that emphasizes mindfulness and appreciation of the tea. Gong Fu is roughly translated to ‘with great care’.

Hosts and tea masters apply Wu Wei when brewing and serving the tea. Wu Wei roughly translates to ‘doing without doing,’ the idea that the brewing seems effortless and does not focus on detailed attention, just an effortless good cup of tea.

“It is not really a ceremony, it’s more of a way to brew tea,” Serritella said.